Saving Seafood

Canada announces new 2021 measures to protect endangered right whales

February 22, 2021 — The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) Canada has announced a plan to better protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale in 2021, carrying over several measures from 2020 and adding new requirements.

Protection of the North Atlantic right whale – one of the most-endangered species on the planet, with roughly 366 individuals remaining – has been an ongoing issue for fisheries in both eastern Canada and the Northeastern U.S. as gear entanglements have been linked to whale deaths. Those ongoing conflicts resulted in a U.S. court declaring the American lobster fishery in violation of the Endangered Species Act, and prompted U.S. senators, in 2019, to call on Canada to do more to protect the species.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

DFO Renews Fishery Management Order Regarding At-Sea Observer Requirements

July 1, 2020 — Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) announce that they are renewing their fishery management order regarding at-sea observer requirements.

As SeafoodNews reported in April, the DFO confirmed that they would be temporarily waiving at-sea observer requirements due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A month later the agency ordered that all fishing activities authorized under the Fisheries Act be carried out without any at-sea observer being onboard fishing vessels, except under the following conditions:

Read the full story at Seafood News

Decline found in Canada’s cod stocks no surprise to scientists

April 10, 2018 — Newspaper headlines in Eastern Canada are reporting northern cod stocks have suffered a significant and surprising decline.

A recent Department of Fisheries, Oceans and Coast Guard (DFO) report revealed cod stocks in the Labrador to Avalon Peninsula dropped 30 percent in 2017 over estimates on the 2015 population.

The decline is significant, scientists studying the fishery agree, but they find fault with reports calling the situation a surprise. It was pretty much predicted by experts, according to Sherrylynn Rowe, a research scientist with the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research at Memorial University in St. John’s.

“Last year, when it became evident that the recent burst of cod productivity had started to slow, my colleague George Rose and I wrote a paper in the journal Nature where we urged the Canadian government not to act on proposals for increased fishery access because we were of the opinion that ramping up the fishery in the face of declining productivity stood to derail the come back that we have seen of late,” Rowe said. “Unfortunately, shortly after that article was published, policymakers opted for a management plan that essentially ignored our pleas, and those by DFO’s own scientists which encouraged keeping removals to the lowest possible levels. Instead, they went ahead and changed the management plan in such a way that allowed removals in 2017 to amount to about three times what they were in 2015.”

This increased the reported catch to 13,000 metric tons in 2017.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

UMass School for Marine Science and Technology – DFO Seminar – February 3, 2016

February 1, 2016 — The following was released by the University of Massachusetts School for Marine Science and Technology:

Department of Fisheries Oceanography 

All Climate is Local:  Lessons in communicating science to the public

Heather Goldstone

NPR Radio Station WCAI and

Science Editor & Host of “Living Lab”

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

SMAST II, Room 157

200 Mill Road, Fairhaven, MA     

Note: Seminar will be simulcast to SMAST I, Room 204.

You can view the seminar live by clicking on “live event”  

Please note: the earliest you will be able to log in is 15 minutes before the regularly scheduled time.

To view a video of an SMAST seminar (post-October 1, 2014), go to http://www.umassd.edu/smast/newsandevents/seminarseries/ and click on a highlighted title.

Canadian government stands ground on surf clam review

December 24, 2015 — The Canadian government will not back down on a decision to order further review of a plan to expand harvesting in the country’s offshore surf clam fishery, the Chronicle-Herald reported.

The recently elected government of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is reconsidering the previous government’s plans to increase the Arctic surf clam quota for 2016, and allow new firms to enter the fishery.

In July, months before the October defeat of previous prime minister Stephen Harper, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said science supported the expansion of the country’s offshore Atlantic surf clam fishery, with a potential increase to the total allowable catch (TAC) from 2015’s 38,756 metric tons to 52,655t, plus bycatch, in 2016.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Canadian government hinders scientists from talking about climate change

October 25, 2015 — Half of the Gulf of Maine ecosystem lies in Canada, where much of the water feeding the gulf and affecting its temperature comes from.

Getting information about scientific research relevant to the future of the ecosystem isn’t easy, however, because of the outgoing Canadian government’s controversial policies that have prevented government scientists from speaking freely with journalists, and sometimes from speaking at all.

While researching this six-part series on climate change in the gulf, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram was repeatedly blocked from speaking to Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientists by communications officers based in Halifax.

Multiple attempts to speak with a researcher based at the St. Andrews Biological Station here about temperature-driven changes in marine species distribution were blocked, even though scientific colleagues both inside and outside the institution said his work was relevant to the questions at hand. “Nobody is willing to talk about this topic at this time,” a DFO spokesman said in a voice-mail message.

Multiple requests to speak to John Loder, director of DFO’s Centre for Ocean Model Development and Application at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography near Halifax, about new sea surface temperature forecasts for the gulf were also denied by department spokespeople, who would only provide written answers to written questions about earlier results from 2013.

Read the full story at Portland Press Herald